CHAPTER 8
The Search Intensifies
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Andy,
and the main
characters
in his case
Andy Puglisi,
a 10-year-old Lawrence boy who vanished without a trace in 1976.
Melanie Perkins,
Andy's childhood playmate, now a filmmaker working on a documentary about his disappearance.
Alan Roy,
a neighborhood resident who came across what may have been a grave in the area where Andy was last seen.
Tony,
Alan's friend, who was with him when they discovered this oddly shaped hole.
Gary Thibedeau,
a troubled neighbor interrogated by police in connection Andy's disappearance.
Faith Puglisi,
Andy's grieving mother, questioned by police.
Angelo Puglisi Sr.,
Andy's irate father.
Jerome Phillips,
Faith's spurned boyfriend.
Wayne W. Chapman,
a convicted pedophile whom police consider the prime suspect in the case.
Charles E. Pierce,
a necrophiliac who Melanie believes may have been involved in Andy's disappearance.
Ann Marie Mires,
head of human identification in the medical examiner's office, who directed a dig at a possible gravesite.
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By Judith Gaines, Globe Staff, 07/11/99
For months, filmmaker Melanie Perkins has been looking for her childhood pal, Andy Puglisi, who disappeared nearly 23 years ago. At last, excavation for a body begins.
It is April 12, the night before the police dog will sniff for bodies, and Melanie is all nerves: restless, anxious, worried. If the dog finds signs of human remains at a site in Lawrence she has identified, it will be the result of months of her hard work.
But now, suddenly, she just wants the whole thing canceled.
"It's about the difference in my heart and my head," Melanie says. "My head knows that tomorrow may bring closure. If something's found, it's better for the family. But I think there's something worse than not knowing what happened. It's knowing that Andy died in the worst possible way. For me, it almost would be better not to know that he was abducted by a guy like Charles Pierce."
The full horror of what may have happened to Andy is hitting hard. Melanie has been reading a book by the Dalai Lama, thinking about what may have been going through Andy's mind in his last moments.
"Imagine a sheep being slaughtered," she says, summarizing the Dalai Lama's writing. "Then imagine yourself as the sheep."
She calls the lead investigator, Sergeant Jack Garvin, to urge a delay, anything to postpone the possibility of bad news. Can't they wait and bring the dogs later, in the summer? she wants to ask. But she is unable to reach him.
The search site is a grassy area in an industrial section of North Lawrence. Police have picked it because it was an open field in the 1950s, when they believe Pierce buried the bodies of two children he said he killed: 7-year-old Janice Pockett, from Tolland, Conn., and a 10- or 11-year-old Lawrence boy he never named.
But in the late 1950s and '60s, Massachusetts Electric Co. built a power substation here, and construction might have disturbed any graves. Melanie has never thought it a likely place to find bodies. And she's sure the crime occurred in the 1970s, not the 1950s.
Under dark clouds April 13, with a cold wind gusting from the north, detectives clutch at their coats as they make their way around the stunted metal tower with its high-voltage transformers. As Melanie watches through a barbed, chain-link fence, the dog, a magnificent German shepherd named Altos, sniffs the area. Altos is searching for whiffs of two foul-smelling chemicals that human bodies emit when they decompose: cadaverine and putrescine.
"They sound like perfect perfumes for Count Dracula," says Melanie's cameraman, Stephen McCarthy.
After less than an hour, the dog's handler, State Police Trooper Chet Warawka, announces Altos' conclusion. "The dog didn't seem to show any real interest out there," he says. The search is unsuccessful.
Largely to accommodate Melanie, police then decide to visit a second site which she has always considered more promising: a section of the woods near the pool where Andy disappeared.
Warawka once again gives the search command, and Altos bounds through the brush, head high. When he reaches the ridge where two men told Melanie they found a shallow grave when they were children, Altos comes to a complete stop. He paws the ground. Then he jumps up and down.
Melanie is transfixed. Oh, God, are they going to find him? she wonders.
Now Altos runs to a tree just below the ridge. Again he jumps up and down, barking excitedly. "If a body was buried here, the tree would get the nutrients from the decomposing body and might give off the smell," Warawka explains. And if a body was buried on the ridge, remains would seep downhill over time.
Investigators decide to conduct more tests.
They return to the site a month later with two dogs who confirm the possibility of human remains at the site atop the ridge and also along the riverbank. So detectives decide to bring a special team to conduct more tests and begin excavation.
On May 27, Dr. Ann Marie Mires, director of the Human Identification Unit in the state Medical Examiner's Office, comes to the site to look for a clandestine grave. Her tools are rudimentary: shovels, trowels, common dust pans, paper bags, prongs, some plastic cups, a rickety two-legged wooden trough with a screened bottom for sifting soil.
"Surface indications suggest there's potentially a pit here," Mires says, surveying the area. The question is, why it was dug, and what does it hold?
She's accompanied by several members of the state crime investigations unit, as well as Sergeant Garvin, Lawrence Police Chief John Romero, Captain Michael Molchan, filmmaker Melanie Perkins, and her camera crew.
For the last few nights, Melanie says, she's been talking to Andy, wherever he is, and praying. She prays that Andy's family will find closure, but still she doesn't want the dig to occur, doesn't want to find the decomposed body of her childhood buddy.
With yellow cloth tape, Mires measures off a rectangular area about 8 feet by 4 feet, marking the perimeters with tiny orange flags. When Molchan and Romero scrape off the top soil, they reveal two different types of soil in an unusual formation.
"This is natural soil," Mires says, cupping a mound of orange clay in one hand. "It was laid down by the river." She points to a darker, oval-shaped area in the center of the rectangle. "The darker color indicates human or animal activity. Now we have to find what kind of activity it was."
The digging proceeds, slowly, as investigators remove the soil inch by inch and then sift through it. While they work, celebratory band music and children's happy voices waft through the woods from a commencement ceremony at a school nearby.
Five hours into the dig, one investigator, shoveling away layers of earth, falls through the floor of the pit, revealing some sort of inner hole with plastic wrappers inside. Next to this is something strange: As Mires taps it with her trowel, it seems hollow. Carefully, she removes more dirt.
"It looks like we have a coffin," she says.
A hush falls over the assembled group. The color drains from Melanie's face. She feels sick.
Mires takes a soil sample to test for human remains.
Further digging reveals a tag of clothing, several .22-caliber shells, a piece of old metal, charcoal, a bit of fabric, and broken beer bottles from the 1970s. But there are no bones. The coffin-shaped wood just seems to be residue from an old fire pit filled with refuse. Mires notes that in other criminal cases, perpetrators have buried victims in garbage pits. The garbage masks the smell of the body and discourages passersby from examining the contents.
But about two hours later, Mires concludes, "There was a pit here dating back to the 1970s. Was there a body in it? No. Could there have been at one time? Maybe. When we check the soil samples, we'll know."
She says she wants to examine the full range of possible sites -- such as the soccer field, other places in these woods, or near the pool -- where police think Andy might be buried. She plans to use ground radar and other tests, and police say they want to bring back the dogs to sniff the area more thoroughly.
They intend to return, possibly this week. Perhaps then they'll find Andy, or some other child, or perhaps they'll find nothing at all.
So now, after all the false leads and dashed hopes, the weeks and months of questioning and investigating, Melanie Perkins has arrived at the same place where so many families and friends of missing children find themselves: Still waiting, still hoping.
Sometimes the daily, serial agony seems too much to bear: all the thoughts of what might have been, the bottomless sense of loss. And the questions: Could I have done something more to prevent this? Why didn't I realize something bad was happening to my child, my friend, my loved one?
To those who still care about them, the missing inhabit a strange, separate world and it keeps calling out to the living, haunting them.
"I pray to God: `I need an answer, I need an answer, I need an answer,' " says Faith Puglisi, Andy's mother.
"But maybe there are lessons to be learned along the way -- like how to let go of anger, which doesn't get you anywhere," she continues. "I could become a bitter old woman. But I pray that no matter how bad things are, how hard, how ugly, let what flows from me be good."
And then there are other times, she says, crying now, when she just wants her little boy back.
For Melanie, the quest -- with all its anxiety and suspense and discoveries more ghoulish than she ever imagined -- has had its compensations. She has located characters in this drama who police couldn't find, found evidence they believed no longer existed. And at last Andy is getting the attention she believes he deserves.
Ultimately, her film -- whenever she finishes it -- is not about finding a body, or the criminal. "It's about understanding, and finding resolution," she says.
"For me, that means exhausting every possibility, finding everything I can about Andy's disappearance. If I'm 80 years old and I still don't know what happened to my friend, at least I've announced to the world: `If anybody knows what happened to Andy, please tell me.' "
As she speaks, she unconsciously makes a fist and her blue-green eyes are full of fire. Her search, like those of so many friends and relatives of missing children, will go on.
Lisa Tuite, the Globe library director, and her research staff helped with the preparation of these stories.
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